


all eden did enclose

by cheloniidae



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts, The Divide (Fallout)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-10 00:21:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13492899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheloniidae/pseuds/cheloniidae
Summary: The Old World speaks of California as a place of beginnings. All Ulysses finds is an end.





	all eden did enclose

When you wake, your ribs are inside your chest again, and your hair is long enough to braid.

That’s what you reach for: a cold comfort from a broken history. This room below the earth is sterile and quiet, and in the dim light of an Old World infirmary you knot the Divide's death into your hair. Never started braids on yourself before-- on sisters and brothers, on cousins, not you. Takes your fingers a few moments to remember the trick of it. Too many dead would be shamed by that. (Be shamed by more than that, but they aren’t here to tell it.)

You weave the same knot you wove into your father’s braids when a fever took your youngest brother, long before Vulpes, and keep going until you run out of length. Can’t fit the full truth of it yet, the hundred-five souls vaporized or buried or burned. You’ve been unconscious for-- a month, you’d say. Two months since you found the Divide; one since you saw the earth break, swallow it whole like the Bull swallowed your tribe.

Makes two peoples lost to you.

Makes you wonder what the point was in waking.

A machine drifts towards you, a blue arc of electricity in the corner of your eye, and makes a soft chirp like a curious hound. Feels like moving a mountain, just turning your head to look at it. Last thing you saw before you blacked out was a pack of machines like this. Enough of them to save more than you— but every bed other than yours is empty, as untouched now as they were five years ago as they were fifty years ago.

“Why me?” Your voice rasps like stone against stone; a cough catches you off guard, burning your lungs and throat until your eyes water.

The machine comes close enough that instinct makes you reach for a weapon that isn’t there, and its light falls on your duster, folded neatly near the foot of your bed. That Old World symbol: bleeding stars in a sea of blue. The machines must have repaired it just as they repaired you; when you fell through the cracks in the earth, you felt--

No.

The flag is the why of it. America reached out one hand to break the Divide, the other to save you from the ashes. Thinks you are of it. These machines-- blindly following duty, not knowing the fate of their country. Ignorant that America the Beautiful died in fire, its soldiers struck down, its cities laid to irradiated ruin. Ignorant that you never wanted to outlast a second home.

  
Where did you first hear his name? Could have been at a bar, from a merchant, inside an Express office. No more memorable than the first drop of rain in a storm. Doesn’t matter what it starts as; matters what it turns into. (Rain breathes life into the desert and sweeps devastation through the canyons. Death in its nature as much as life. You should have known.)

Hadn’t met him yet, but you knew him like you’d know your reflection in the Colorado. The two of you walked roads no other courier would. He was of the West but could not stay there, could not stay still, no more satisfied with what he found in the Bear than you were with the Bull. No home on either bank of the river. Every road you walked, you looked for his long-vanished footsteps; in every Express office, you read his name on the list.

In Primm, his name was crossed out. “He turned it down,” Nash explained when you asked. “Said he’d rather take a job going to the Divide. Told him this was better money, but he wouldn’t have it.”

“The Divide.” Name sat heavy on your tongue. You’d heard rumors of it: the new vein between the Bear’s heartland and its extremities in the Nevada frontier.

“A bunch of fools with no sense decided to settle in some pass on Highway 127,” Nash said, mistaking your contemplation for ignorance. “Them folks must have a whole lot of luck on their side. They even have a school; Levitt bought some books for it while he was here.”

You had your standing orders. Bleed the land of the Two-Headed Bear. Cut every vein and artery. Starve it of all that a nation and its army needs. Other words: break the Divide.

But it wasn’t Caesar that drove you to the Divide. Wasn’t duty. It was him.

You had a dream that night, one you’ll try to forget but won’t quite manage. The Courier stood before you-- the two of you alone in the desert, a town behind him, buildings rising out of the earth like mountains. He held out his heart to you like he held out the land: red soil, red muscle. “Welcome home,” he said, in the voices of fifty dead tribes. His heart glistened in his fingers like a drop of sunset.

You woke weeping.

  
Your body is a stubborn thing, but so are you, in your scorched-earth hollowed-out way. Didn’t ask to be saved, didn’t ask America to stitch you back together, didn’t ask your heart to keep beating. Drink, your body says, and you ignore it. You’re a son of the desert, the vast and rolling Sonoran -- a name you learned from books, not the name you grew up calling it -- and thirst is no stranger to you. Easier to lie here. Keep your mind empty of lost homes and bodies left to rot under rubble.

A machine comes again. Can’t tell if it’s the same one; if there are any differences between them, they’re too small to tell. It chirps, and light from it washes over you. You feel-- you don’t know what you feel. Vulnerable. Seen. It’s inspecting you with something other than eyes, and it can’t like what it finds, because it chirps again, low and displeased. The machines must have fed you, watered you, while you slept. If you don’t do it yourself, they’ll do it for you.

Isn’t love of life that makes you rise and stagger to the sink. It’s stubborn pride. Only twenty steps, but you have to pause twice, bracing yourself against an empty bed while your aching lungs gasp for stale air and the burning in your legs subsides. They’re weak after a month of disuse. So are you.

The machine watches you in silence, makes no attempt to interfere. Doesn’t douse your hate for it. Lessens it, a bit.

Eventually, you make it to the sink. You cup your hands under the faucet to drink, can’t help relishing the cold water soothing your parched throat. You limit yourself out of habit. Dangerous to drink too much when you’re this dehydrated, something every child learns before their first scouting--

Learned.

Harder to think in the past tense, with new braids tugging at your scalp.

You wash your face when you’re done drinking. No dust comes off, no ash, no bits of debris. Something else the machines took care of. Washed the Divide’s ruin off of you, left you clean and not-quite-whole. Feels like part of a lung was carved out. You’ll learn, later, that it was.

Food comes next: centuries-old military rations, taken from a supply cabinet. Your stomach is unused to solid food; you chew slowly -- even the muscles in your jaw have weakened -- and you taste none of it. No pleasure in it. Only the thought of the machines feeding you like an infant makes you force the meal down. Last of your tribe, last of the Divide. Your pride is for more than just you.

One more weight on your shoulders. One more history to carry. Owe it to them to see the wreckage, before you join them.

  
Soldiers of the Bear sank their claws into the Divide long before the Courier’s footsteps led you to it. Guarding the road, the caravans, their precious supply line from West to East. They wore their symbol on their chests: that two-headed bear, twisted from the Old World into something at war with itself. They couldn’t tell what you were; as ignorant of the frumentarius in their midst as they were of history. But history breathed in the Divide, and everywhere you looked, the flag of the Old World stared back.

Old World speaks of California as a place of beginnings. Open fields like waiting arms, trees laden with fruit for the taking. Leave the burdens of the East at the border: drought and famine, dust and history. Start over in the golden land where the fruit grows.

You’d traveled the West enough to see the lie in the siren song. You came to California for its end, not your beginning. And yet. And yet.

The Divide had no orchards, no green and berry-flowered fields, only paltry greenhouses built from wooden frames and plastic tarps. But there was a life here. A people here, gathered under the symbol you wear on your back, paying their due to history. Strong to survive in this unforgiving stretch of desert; stronger still to have been raked by the Bear but not yet swallowed.

You looked at the Divide. Thought of beginnings. Thought: maybe the Old World was right.

Your world shifted here, a change no less than that which the warheads would soon bring. The East was lost to you between one heartbeat and the next.

  
There is an empty space in this history that belongs to the dead. Won’t disturb them now. They earned their rest in blood and fire, and their bones aren’t yours to tell. Let the ashes settle, the bodies return to the earth, the broken houses rot. Nothing behind this door you need reminding of. Some things a man can’t stop seeing.

Back to the living, if you can call them that.

There are creatures -- not men -- in the fresh wound in the earth that nearly was your home. Skin flayed by the wind, red muscle exposed to the sky, no less broken than the ground itself. Even when you don’t see them, you hear them howling. Name them Marked Men for the way the Divide has carved them, but they aren’t yours to claim. He broke the Divide. They, and all the death in this place, belong to him.

Think, at first, they might be survivors of the Divide itself-- but when you get close enough to look, their uniforms kill hope and fear in one stroke. Bear and Bull, bound together by pain and a hell that hates them more than they hate each other. You were the only Legion here when the earth broke. Caesar’s been sending more men into this pit, into the storms and invisible fires. Looking for answers that he’ll never find.

You avoid the Marked Men when you can, and when you can’t--

Footsteps behind you, fast, rhythm and weight like a blade is in hand. A sound you know canyon-deep. Your muscles may be weaker than they were, but your reflexes aren’t. Wouldn’t be alive if you didn’t know how to disarm an opponent, take his weapon for yourself.

This is the fear that drives your blade into the Marked Man’s throat: if you fall here, the machines will bring you back.

You spend the minutes after the fight doubled over coughing, your lungs punishing you for the exertion, for the dust you breathe in when you gasp for air. Need to find something to filter it. Can feel the invisible fires burning you from the inside already.

Easier to see with blood glistening on the metal that it’s an imitation of Lanius’ own weapon. Original cut the throats of Painted Rock, put fear of Caesar into Oklahoma. You’ve seen it at work, though most don’t survive to tell. The replica is a mockery, you think now. You’ll learn better.

Blade only confirms what you already knew: this was one of the Bull, clinging to Legion symbols even with his flesh and mind stripped away. Because of it, maybe. An existence like that needs an anchor; you know how it is, having lost yours. But you’re philosophizing around the point, and that point cuts like the blade in your hands.

You killed one of your brothers.

They are your brothers, still.

There’s a place you need to go.

  
Legion thought they’d get into the community through you, and they had the right of it.

“We’re always pleased to get new folks,” Daya said as she led you to an empty house. The Divide had been waiting since the War for people to fill it. Her voice betrayed her as walking west from Two Suns; the way people moved out of her path betrayed her as their leader. Not the way of the East. Maybe something of the East that was.

The people welcomed you in their ways. Most of their faces are lost to you in fire, ash, and time-- but some you remember still. A pair of Ciphers (never told their tribe, but you could) helped fix the wiring in your new home, until the lights glowed without flickering; a man of the West told you the schedule for working the common greenhouses; an old ghoul came offering drink, which you refused, and stories of the Old World, which you never could.

“Denver was a shitshow,” Maggie rasped. “We got called in to keep the peace--” she made a sound that would be snorting, if she had a nose “--but there was never gonna be any of that. You make people stand in line for eight hours, then tell ‘em you ran out of food for the day? All the soldiers and cyberdogs in the world ain’t gonna stop them from rioting.”

“Seen Denver hounds tear men apart,” you said. “Never seen a crowd they couldn’t handle.”

“You kids don’t understand what a crowd means. I’m talking five-hundred-thousand pissed-off Coloradans, and all we ever did was make ‘em angrier. I got tired of shooting at civilians who just wanted some damn food, and that’s when I got locked up. Prisons were so crowded they started having to use schools. I still remember where they sent me, ‘cause it was named after our own coward president. Baines High.”

You remembered that building: the barbed wire, the faded name painted above the reinforced doors. A group of Hangdogs had tried to barricade themselves in there. Didn’t work. “School’s still standing,” you said.

“I’ll be fucked. Have to remember to burn it down before I lose too many fingers.” She looked you over, reassessing you. “Sounds like you’ve been all over.”

“I’m a courier.”

“All right,” she said, drawing out the words. “Courier. We’ll go with that.”

  
History puts the world in order: this happened, then this. Pins the past down with dates and figures until its bloodied jaws loosen. Says: the Divide was ruined, and that is past. I-40 was strewn with crosses, and that is past.

But the Divide is always happening.

It happens when your lungs catch on the desert dust, and the coughing makes you bend double. Your own body’s lesson: you are not whole. You are something resurrected by the Old World, and this desert -- the saguaro, the yucca trees, the sun-baked earth -- no longer belongs to you. The coughing makes you thirsty. Didn’t bring enough water, and that wasn’t by accident.

It happens when you find shelter from a rad-storm in an empty vault, and you spend the night staring up at the ceiling, waiting for the collapse. Think you see your ribs gleaming in the walled-off dark. Better to fill up your thoughts with someone else’s history, you decide. You trace the terminal entries through the first floor, but when your feet reach the stairs, screaming instinct binds them. Can’t go deeper into the earth, so soon after it swallowed you.

It happens when you pause at the outskirts of Flagstaff, a hand on your knife, ready to shear your braids. No tribal markings, says Lord Caesar. The only tribe in the Bull is the Bull. Any memory of past divisions is a rot that must be cut out, strung up as an example. On the day you left Flagstaff, there was a man tied to a cross in the heart of the city, among the teeming market stalls and the slaves bartering on their masters’ behalves. He’d redone the coyote tattoo that Graham scalded off of him. Didn’t hide his crime well enough.

Past screaming, when you saw him, his own weight crushing his lungs. But his bloodshot eyes followed you every moment. Wasn’t asking to be let down; was asking for the only mercy left to him.

You kept walking.

Keep walking, now. Leave your blade sheathed, the loss woven in your braids untouched. The Divide happens and happens; Dry Wells has been happening longer. No stop to either of them. If Caesar strikes you down--

Then that’s two histories put to rest.

  
The Courier was gone from the Divide, but his shadow loomed over it sure as the Bear’s. Different kind of shadow-- a mountain giving reprieve to the people in its shade. Saved the Divide from starvation, from disease, keeping it alive with supplies and the trail he wore into the earth.

Everyone you met had a kind word for him. A vault-dweller, they said, though none knew which one. A teacher. After the Divide’s few children learned you were a courier, too, they asked when he’d be coming home. Every day, the same question.

There were too many days. Not enough of them.

You told yourself that you were waiting for a chance to act. Bear’s weight was heavy here-- too heavy for one courier to lift. Needed to wait, watch, find where the artery could be slit. You were a frumentarius, chosen by Caesar as his eyes and ears and hands. You told yourself that your waiting had its purpose.

Purpose didn’t matter, in the end. The Courier struck first.

  
Years later, now. You aren’t dead— not by Caesar’s hand, not by your own, and not for lack of trying. Death follows close at heel, but it won’t bite. You’ve lived long enough to give New Canaan to the flames, to ask questions of Old World gods, to let your hair grow until it can hold the full truth of the Divide in its knots and braids and gleaming beads. But not long enough to forget him. Could be as old as the canyon that Caesar cast his Legate into, and the Courier would still be ash in your lungs.

Spent years looking for the man who ended the Divide. Now your search is at its end, too.

You find Wolfhorn Ranch abandoned, falling apart, in a land caught between East and West. Bear sinks its teeth into one flank, Bull tramples the other. Can’t say which caught the last owner, or if one is the reason for the grave by the barren flagpole. No name-- someone else’s history buried, forgotten. Not yours to dig through. Their only role in this story is to nourish the grass you’ve claimed as your own.

You string bridges between the hills, dig the well deeper, give yourself to this little plot of land that will never be more than it is. No nation here, just brahmins and bighorners and bridges rocking side to side in the wind.

The flagpole will stand empty until you find a symbol worth flying.

Your feet can’t stay still, even now. When the miles start to tug at you, you find yourself on the path to the nearest Express office. Nash doesn’t recognize you. You haven’t been back here in the four years since the Divide’s name first caught you, dragged you to a nation that would die in fire. Old World had a saying about those who don’t learn from history, but here you are. And when the job’s done, the ranch is waiting for you.

You’re not at peace, but for a while, you find something close.

  
Do you remember watching him return, bearing a package that would shatter the earth?

Your feet were heavy with unwalked miles, the day the Courier brought death to the Divide. You weren’t meant to stay still for long, but here you were, waiting and watching. More watching, at the moment. Dividers didn’t trust the Bear to keep eyes on the road, but they did trust one of their own.

He emerged from the road sand-whipped, sweating, mouth covered by a kerchief to keep out the dust. Your first time seeing him, but you would know him anywhere.

He stopped to ask the soldiers where their Major was, and your eyes weren’t on the road anymore. Had a package to deliver, he told them, all the way from the California coast.

A soldier signed for the package, and this was when you saw it: the machinery, the markings. The package was from the West, but it looked like a splinter of America coming home. A sleeping nation being reborn here in the Divide, with the Courier bringing it to life.

He nodded at you as he walked past, courier recognizing courier.

It was the last you saw of him before the earth broke.

  
You think he’s dead, when you walk into the Mojave Express office. Nash has a job waiting for you: a platinum poker chip, stamped with the same sigil as the sealed bunker at Caesar’s camp across the river. Legion tried opening it, failed, and you think that’s for the best. The bunker’s another piece of the Old World, buried and sleeping. It’ll rend the world like a dream when it wakes.

If a messenger wakes it. Nash has a list of them in front of him, ready to replace you. You skim it by habit, making note of the other frumentarii, knowing you won’t see--

Him. Reading his name is like breathing in the air of the Divide. The room feels too small, suddenly, like being buried under ruins, like history coming to claim its due. Takes a moment for your breath to come back to you. “Is this name real?”

“Levitt? Right as lack of rain, he’s still kicking.”

“Give him the job,” you say, and put the chip down. It reeks of Old World death, and that death is his burden. Belongs to him. Nash tries to talk you out of it, but you don’t hear it, can’t hear it over the echoes of the Divide breaking open. “Let Courier Six carry it,” you say.

You don’t say his name. Names are for men, women, nations, homes. The Courier is none of that. He’s a message, a lesson. And now— your message to him.

  
This, too, is a memory:

You followed him east on the road, into a rising sun and a rising nation. All frumentarii know how to remain unseen, and you didn’t want him seeing you yet. The Divide-- that was where you’d speak to him. Where the two of you would throw off the weight of the Bear and let his nation, your nation, breathe as it should.

The package he carried was painted with symbols that nearly matched those of the Divide. He examined it, sometimes, tracing the E in the center of the circle of stars. You thought he was thinking of home as he did it.

And that home was where he led you. You know how this goes by now, don’t you? You’ve lived it enough. He will hand over the machine, and you will follow the soldiers as they bring it to a silo, and you will watch as the machine opens to speak the words that will break a nation.

Which memory speaks true? Which is the lie?

Who are you, who do not know your history?

  
You think the Chip will be the death of him. Weigh him down enough for the desert to catch up. Death is easy to find in the Mojave: it’s in the blazing sun and the dry earth and the bones scattered across the sand. All it needs is a chance, and he’ll get what he’s owed, what he owes you. An ending for both of you.

But you’re wrong.

You’re back at Wolfhorn when you hear the news-- repairing the generator, trying to ground yourself back into the patterns of the life you carved here. Listen. Can’t you hear the brahmin lowing? Can’t you hear the windmill you built, creaking in the breeze?

This is as much a home to you as anything can be, which is to say it’s no home at all-- but there is a life. A life without Caesar’s hounds (your brothers, still); without the rot of the West; without the chilling breath of Old World ghosts. All you need do is stay. Let the Bull and Bear pass you by. Isn’t that what you’ve done since you left the Big Empty and its answers behind?

But it’s no use. He is the loose thread in the fabric of you: one tug and it all falls apart.

A package courier found shot in the head near Goodsprings has made a full recovery, says the voice of Vegas, and the wire in your hand bends until it breaks.

**Author's Note:**

> Cool, irrigating streams refresh these lands,  
> And give to us all Eden did enclose  
> Of bud, and bloom, and fruit; for toiler's hands  
> Have made these deserts blossom as the rose.  
> \- William Wendell Riley, "A California Home"


End file.
